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Github: Name-calling and rudeness is scourge of open source community

And it's still a man's world

OPEN SOURCE REPOSITORY Github has revealed that poor documentation is the scourge of the open source world, described as "highly valued" but "frequently overlooked".

In its latest open source survey, the firm notes that negative reactions (most notably, 'rudeness') are highly visible and although infrequent, that combination can actually make matters even worse, affecting the project's activity and contributions.

Diversity is an issue, with the results used by the whole world but the contributors not reflecting different facets of society.

Amongst respondents, open source is the default choice for software (as you'd expect) and that using, and even contributing to open source happens 'on the job' as Github puts it.

So the key takeaways? People need to write better documentation to go with their projects, which involves collaborating with every contributor to keep it up to date, and most importantly, be excellent to each other.

"Documentation helps orient newcomers: how to use a project, how to contribute back, the terms of use and contribution, and the standards of conduct in a community," says the report, noting that 93 per cent have witnessed incomplete or out of date documentation, while a further 60 per cent claim never to contribute to documentation.

Meanwhile, negative interactions can seemingly kill a project.

"18 per cent of respondents have personally experienced a negative interaction with another user in open source, but 50 per cent have witnessed one between other people. It's not possible to know from this data whether the gap is due to people who experienced such interactions leaving open source, or broad visibility of incidents."

The top three were rudeness (45 per cent), name-calling (20 per cent) and stereotyping (11 per cent). 21 per cent said that negative interaction had led them to stop working on a project.

Unsurprisingly, the glass ceiling is firmly in place with 95 per cent of respondents being men, just three per cent women and one per cent non-binary. Which leaves one per cent unaccounted for. Wasps?

Talking about the findings, Github said: "We hope you'll use the data to inform decisions about community, tooling, and prioritisation of work; understand the needs and experiences of different parts of the community; and do new and interesting research on a remarkable system of peer production that powers so much of modern life,"

The entire dataset is available as a Github repository for anyone that wants to fiddle with it. µ